Using Flash with AJAX
Flash has got some attention from web applications perspective. There are frameworks/plugins that send back response from server which can be processed by a Flash player. Here is couple of them which I bumped into recently.
- Fjax - Fjax (F replaces A in Ajax and stands for Flash) works similar to AJAX. It utilizes the built in power of Flash’s XML parser to process the XML response from the server. Here is an interview with the developers, Steve and Jay in WebMonkey that has explanations of how Fjax works.
- Juggernaut - Juggernaut is rails plugin that uses the push technology. Once a communication is established between the client and server through the Flash socket, the information can be pushed from the server side to the client side. The concept is somewhat similar to the Reverse Ajax. Refer the Ajaxian article “Juggernaut: Comet for Rails?” for more information on this.
Looking ahead there will be more of such frameworks and plugins coming into picture because of the need for rich UI web application and Flash can definitely be helpful of what it already has the capability for.
